At a Nashville estate sale a few months ago, in a most wonderful moldy basement, I dug out from underneath a heap of newspapers (which I also purchased) a fairly decent copy of the 1926 volume of Elam’s Notes. In it were two receipts of unknown origin and this broadside. Acidic and brittle, it is about 8 x 10 in.

American Baptist Seminary continues to this hour as American Baptist College. I suspect the Gilbert Tolbert mentioned here is one and the same as this WW2 Navy veteran. This broadside notwithstanding, Bob Marshall served two years as Davidson County Sheriff, 1940-1942. Who knows of L. B. Nelson or the Corinthian Baptist Church? Who knows of R. D. ‘Bob’ Marshall? Who knows of Gilbert Tolbert?

Card-stock tract, 5 x 3 9/16 in., undated. Published by Chester Baker, 3801 Elkins Avenue, Nashville, Tennessee. Elkins runs parallel to, and is two blocks south of, Charlotte Avenue in West Nashville. Chester lived at the corner of 38th Avenue and Elkins about one block southwest of the Park Avenue Church of Christ (earlier known as the Pilcher Avenue Church of Christ). In the directories I have from Charlotte Avenue Church of Christ (8 blocks due west) there is no Chester Baker. I do not have, nor have seen, directories from Park Avenue/Pilcher Avenue. There are other possibilites…many…but the usual suspects first.

Chester presents in canonical order every occurrence of the terms church and churches in the New Testament (King James Version). From this table he isolates and interprets about a dozen verses into a compact ecclesiology. N. B. Hardeman remarked he could state his position on any doctrinal question on a postcard and still have room to ask about Susie and the babies. Brodie would be proud on Chester on that count.

Chester’s card is a flyaway, an ephemeral snapshot of one man’s convictions tucked between the pages of a book. What of him? and what of his ecclesial affiliation in West Nashville? These are good questions.

Newsprint photograph of the Cookeville (TN) Collegiate Institute, undated, about 6in sq. This has nothing to do with anything I blog about…just a flyaway in one of my books. I’ve scanned many items in the past several weeks; some of the them have already been posted to this blog and the rest are forthcoming. Cookeville Collegiate Institute was in the flyaway stack with a couple dozen assorted postcards and a few old coupons, bookmarks, and more. I post it here because I think it is a neat little item. Hopefully someone looking for an image of the old place will find in it just what they need. Whence and whither for this little photograph…well, your guess is as good as mine. Moral of the story: check your books for flyaways. You might find somethig really neat, or random, or both, or neither. I’ve checked every book I own but haven’t found any folding money.